I still love Sean Connery, but man, you gotta give it to Roger Moore – he was a damn good Bond, too. The seven Bond movies after Connery left the franchise are pretty solid: the stories are good, the ladies are beautiful, and the action scenes are usually fun. Although there does seem to be a bit of recycling going on, I guess because there are only so many different kinds of chase scenes you can do: car chases, boat chases, underwater chases, and ski chases. And the “comic relief” provided in two movies by the hick sheriff didn’t do very much for me.

But I love Bond’s way with the ladies, I love his clever puns (is there any other kind?), and I love the way that the bad guys rarely want to kill him – they’d always much rather talk to him, invite him to their mansion, let him sleep with their ladies, and then set-up easily escapable and contrived ways to kill him. Actually, only Christopher Walken was one of the few nemeses who actively tried to really, directly kill James every chance he got. Way to go, Walken!

My favorite flick of the lot is easily The Spy Who Loved Me – that one just had it all. Unfortunately, it was followed by Moonraker, which has almost exactly the same plot, except instead of the megalomaniacal villain wanting to start a new super-race underwater, Drax wants to do it in space. And the laser gun battle was just too easy to laugh at. Oh, but Jaws gets credit for coolest Bond henchman ever.

I also watched the unofficial Bond movie Never Say Never Again, which was just sort of silly. Why Connery decided to take on the role yet again do do a remake of Thunderball had to be motivated by money, pure and simple. (Right?) He looked terribly old (although the same could be said of Moore in his last outings), there were no surprises in the story, and I have to say that the lack of the Bond theme made the movie’s soundtrack feel empty.

Next up, Dalton and Brosnan…